Books, Arts & Manners: Soap and Sympathy

You’re a better man than I am, Lynda Hirsch … or should I say person? At any rate, Miss Hirsch’s superiority is one of the few solid conclusions this writer has reached after spending several weeks immersed in television soap operas. Truth to tell, while the immersion was six weeks long, it was only toe deep. All 14 of the current major network soaps—at least to this jaded viewer—proved so trite, tasteless, and predictable that it was physically impossible to watch any episode for more than a few minutes at a time. Hence my respect for, and gratitude to, the aforesaid Lynda Hirsch. The Saint-Simon of soaps, this worthy lady, with a reckless disregard for her digestion and peace of mind, chronicles the weekly outbreaks of love, lust, and larceny on, to list them in alphabetical order, All My Children, Another World, As the World Turns, Capitol, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, Guiding Light, Loving, One Life to Live, Rituals, Ryan’s Hope, Santa Barbara, Search for Tomorrow, and The Young and the Restless (the latter, given the amount of partial nudity it indulges in, might better be called The Young and the Dressless).

Carried, courtesy of the News-American Syndicate, by Sunday papers across the country, Miss Hirsch’s soapy synopses, while mainly intended for fans who have missed an episode or two, provide excellent source material for the social scholar. Just as browsing through a 1904 Sears Roebuck catalogue tells us more about how average Americans of the period lived and what they wanted than any number of Henry James novels, so Lynda Hirsch’s new, improved concentrated summaries of who is doing what to whom in Soapland are a much more reliable guide to popular contemporary morals and manners than the combined works of Updike, Vonnegut, and Vidal. This because the biggest economic and social bloc in modern America is not the Yuppies but the Cluppies (Upwardly Mobile Clods), that great, semi-washed lower middle class that pays most of our taxes, fights most of our wars, and watches most of our commercial programming. Nothing better reflects, albeit in a distorted fun-house mirror, changing Cluppy tastes and abiding Cluppy obsessions than the soaps.

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Aram Bakshian Jr.

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You’re a better man than I am, Lynda Hirsch … or should I say person? At any rate, Miss Hirsch’s superiority is one of the few solid conclusions this writer has reached after spending several weeks immersed in television soap operas. Truth to tell, while the immersion was six weeks long, it was only toe deep. All 14 of the current major network soaps—at least to this jaded viewer—proved so trite, tasteless, and predictable that it was physically impossible to watch any episode for more than a few minutes at a time. Hence my respect for, and gratitude to, the aforesaid Lynda Hirsch. The Saint-Simon of soaps, this worthy lady, with a reckless disregard for her digestion and peace of mind, chronicles the weekly outbreaks of love, lust, and larceny on, to list them in alphabetical order, All My Children, Another World, As the World Turns, Capitol, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, Guiding Light, Loving, One Life to Live, Rituals, Ryan’s Hope, Santa Barbara, Search for Tomorrow, and The Young and the Restless (the latter, given the amount of partial nudity it indulges in, might better be called The Young and the Dressless).

Carried, courtesy of the News-American Syndicate, by Sunday papers across the country, Miss Hirsch’s soapy synopses, while mainly intended for fans who have missed an episode or two, provide excellent source material for the social scholar. Just as browsing through a 1904 Sears Roebuck catalogue tells us more about how average Americans of the period lived and what they wanted than any number of Henry James novels, so Lynda Hirsch’s new, improved concentrated summaries of who is doing what to whom in Soapland are a much more reliable guide to popular contemporary morals and manners than the combined works of Updike, Vonnegut, and Vidal. This because the biggest economic and social bloc in modern America is not the Yuppies but the Cluppies (Upwardly Mobile Clods), that great, semi-washed lower middle class that pays most of our taxes, fights most of our wars, and watches most of our commercial programming. Nothing better reflects, albeit in a distorted fun-house mirror, changing Cluppy tastes and abiding Cluppy obsessions than the soaps.